Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Epassporte good or bad?

At the first sight epassporte is a great service. The ATM card is a good idea, being one of the fastest way to send/get money around the world, specially in the countries where paypal is not accepted.It seems to be very popular in the webmasters groups, many affiliate programs have epassporte payout options which makes them more atractible.All is well until you get into troubles. The first and most common, is that your plastic card will arrive with delays or it will eventually get lost. Then you have to contact them and their customer support is not really horrible but is bad, they keep you waiting on the phone, which can be a nightmare for non-US people. Then eventually a new plastic card is mailed, it arrive and you set your PIN and are now able to get money from ATM.

But many users talk about other kind of problems such as fraud. I also had this kind of problem, when a big amount of money was fraudulenty transferred from my account. First when I contacted them, they were acting very lousy saying it's all my fault and that I lost the money. But after 2 weeks, they solved the problem very well.

Then once when retrieving from ATM, I got some error and they said transaction was unable to proceed, however when I got home and logged in into my epasporte account I saw that the requested balance was missing from my account. First I contacted the bank which owns the ATM, they said I have to contact my own bank in order to start the investigation. Epassporte was again very slow in this matter, I had to send several mails and make several phone calls until things started to move and after one or two weeks, my money were back.

Another common problem is when you login your account and find that "Information is required", account access restricted and you cannot make any operation. Unfortunately all this happens without any notification. And usually there is no real problem, just Epassporte needs some documents from you, but instead of telling you first and give you grace period until locking your account, they choose the abusive way and lock your account first. Then you have to go again through all contacting process(phones, emails, etc) and if you send the requested documents after some days your access to epassporte account is restored. Phew.

Overall epassporte handled well my problems but with very many delays. And although I said not just once that I will stop using them for having lousy answering time, I keep using them, maybe because there is no real competition on this area and they are hard to replace, ikobo was an option but not anymore.

I highly recommend AGAINST using epassporte. I have been attempting to use the service for the past sixty days and have had nothing but bad experiences. To now they have "frozen" $500 of mine, and have been completely unresponsive to repeated calls and emails. Save yourself the trouble and use anything BUT epassporte.

Anyone knows if epassporte is in some real trouble right now?They don't reply/answer even I've called to them regarding my about 1 month ago arrived Visa Debit card. It's stated that my card is activated and should work correctly, but no way. All the ATM's just spit it out without any error message.

Epassporte support told me after keeping me (calling outside of USA) a LONG time wait, asking all the questions that can imagine, and in the end told me 'there is some technical problem with your card, please call again to ask if it's ok'. Call AGAIN?? Every day or what? I ask her to tell someone to inform me by email when I'm able to use my card again, and get my own money out of my epassporte account. She didn't promise that but continue saying 'call again'.

Running any internet business, to get your own money in time to pay your bills and salaries for the people who work for you is one of the MOST IMPORTANT thing. Epassporte seems to not care about that at all.

Do anyone have idea what is the investigation official to contact in case like this?

I don't know what country are you on, but on most countries locally issued Visa cards are NOT exactly the same than an international Visa card. For instance in South America there are local, regional, and international versions of the Visa card.

Local ones work only within the country they were issued. Regional ones work usually "within the region" that is within, say, South America (Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay), and then there's the "international" Visa cards that work anywhere.

In short: to operate with international Visa cards (like your ePassporte one) you need to find an ATM that sports the "VISA PLUS" logo. That means that ATM is connected to the world-wide Visa network and not just your local one.

Epassporte really sucks. I have always received all my moneys there, but it was always a lot of work. The list of reasons why they won't release funds is endless:

- account banned for verification purposes- technical problems- safety measures- ep does not work in certain countries of the world due to higher fraud rates or money laundering

E-Mails are not being answered. Their assistance when calling hotlines requires always 10 minutes for verification and after having verified that the caller is authorized, they might give stupid excuses.

One of my accounts there was closed three times for verification purposes and each time I called to complain, they would repeat telling me, I have to send in the documentation, which they have not received or needed 10 days to check. They would never let you know that they have correctly received some documentation or have processed it.

In the end I found a guy who is working at epassporte who I can contact with all my problems via email. He has sorted them all out and everytime I have new fund on epassporte, I simply wire-transfer them. I don't mind about the 50 USD as it is still a lot cheaper than using the epassporte electron card.

My advice to all of you having troubles to collect your funds: 1. Don't ever give up calling them. Use Skype and it will be very cheap. 2. Write down the names of the assistants. Mention the names of the assistants you have already talked to and the times before starting the conversation, that scares the shit out of them.3. When sending documentation, make sure you fill out the forms correctly and completely and that they are legible.4. Always ask for a ticket number. Always keep refering to that ticket number.5. Stay calm and curteous, don't offend the stupid staff too much. They are victims as well as you.

As I said before, I always collected all of my moneys until today, but it is very hard...

EPassporte are crooks, it's as simple as that. I opened an account and put $50 form my credit card on it. After a few days I received an email saying that my account was put on hold until I verified my identity with bank statements, credit card copies, ID copies and whatnot. Are they really believing I send that to a company who's CEO is having troubles with child pornography and is trying to clean his image there?

Luckily visa greed to do a chargeback and give me my money back. I don't understand why visa or mastercard are working with such a crooked company

I have been using epassporte for years with very little problems. As a merchant it is one of the few low interest charging processors. Only problem is setting up takes a while and they have stringent fraud protection for customer to protect both customer and merchant. It is often too un-user friendly because of that. I can say that they had alot of issues with gambling sites and apparently people were getting personal info off people from unscrupulous places. Epassporte is currently trying to resolve these matters by making it so the person has to log-in and place their monies in wallet from virtual card in order to cash the money. It should work at all Bank Of Americas or Regions Banks ATMs. And they continue to be the main choice of big adult sites to pay their affilates/webmasters all over the world. For instance if you develop commissioned links for adult sites, the adult sites would pay you using epassporte.

epassporte is bad! Very bad! it is a scam! I bought a virtual visa card from www. epaynmonster website in Nigeria. The advertisement is that the virtual visa card is accepted anywhere visa is used. This is false as the epassporte decline all payments to online merchants that i have so far given my virtual card number!

Really epassport is a great service. An ATM card can be used everywhere and in anytime when one wanna withdraw money or send money to someone around the world. It is the most easiest way of getting or sending money to someone.